AIMA has reported that its appointment numbers rose by 60 percent, and the figure has been presented as evidence that the immigration agency is getting better. Read the sentence twice. An appointment is a slot a person was forced to ask for. It exists because a file was stuck, a renewal was late, or a first contact could not be made through any other door. More appointments means more people reached the point where they needed one. That is a measure of demand, and demand for a service that was already failing.
The framing does a lot of quiet work. A 60 percent rise sounds like a rising output line, the kind a ministry puts on a slide next to a green arrow. But the question a reader should ask is the one the release leaves out: 60 percent against what, and how many people are still waiting for a first slot at all. If the baseline was a system that was already slow, a higher count of bookings can coexist with a longer queue, a longer wait for the booking itself, and a longer wait for the decision that follows. The number records that the agency is busier. It does not record that anyone has got through.
This is the pattern that has run since the old SEF was dissolved and AIMA took over its functions in 2023. The transition was sold as modernization. What followed was a documented accumulation of pending residence and renewal files, running into the hundreds of thousands, and a public that learned to measure its life in months spent holding a protocol letter instead of a card. Protocol letters, in turn, became their own problem: employers, banks, and landlords had to decide whether a piece of paper that is supposed to stand in for a document is valid, and each institution decided differently. Mass regularizations have been used as a relief valve for the same backlog, which means the state has, in effect, admitted it cannot process the ordinary flow and chosen to clear the stock by decree. A decree clears a queue once. It does not build the capacity that keeps the queue from forming again.
Then there is the enforcement side, which the appointment story never mentions. Return orders issued under Portuguese law are supposed to end in removal or in a documented departure. The public record on how many of those orders are executed is thin, and the gap between orders issued and orders carried out has been a recurring object of criticism from the same parliamentary and press channels that cover AIMA's backlog. A system that cannot decide an ordinary residence file in reasonable time also cannot tell the country, with any confidence, who is lawfully here, who is waiting for a lawful status, and who has been told to leave and has not left. Those are three different populations. The agency's dashboards tend to blur them into one count of "cases."
The people caught in this are not abstractions. They include workers who pay into the system and cannot get the document that would let them change jobs, students whose courses depend on a permit that has not arrived, and families who schedule their lives around a date that keeps moving. They are also the people a functioning immigration state is supposed to serve, and the people whose trust it most needs. A process that takes a year to answer a yes-or-no question teaches everyone involved that the rules are a suggestion and that the only reliable route is a favor, a lawyer, or a loophole. That lesson is not confined to migrants. It spreads to every citizen who watches the state fail at a task it claims to have under control.
I do not know what the next appointment figure will be, and neither does the agency, or at least it has not published the number that would tell us. The figure that would matter is simple: how many people are waiting today for a first appointment, how long they have been waiting, and how many files leave the building each month with a final answer. A rising count of slots, reported as progress, is a way of answering a different question. The uncomfortable part is that the answer to the real question has been available in pieces for years, and the ministry keeps publishing the pieces that look best.